#872 Conservitation

Sometimes it’s hard to be environmental. It’s funny how the popularity of the environmental movement waxes and wanes.
But I gotta say I was one before there was one.
Maybe it’s because I’m a cheapskate. I was never into the throwaway society. Even today, I will reuse those thick plastic zip-lock freezer bags. Wash them out, dry them on my dishrack, use them again.
I’ve never liked seeing trash along the roadway. When I was a kid, I would pick it up and take it home to the garbage can. I also collected bottles too. Back then, they had the ultimate recyclable containers, glass. It didn’t take nearly the energy of aluminum to produce. You paid a deposit when you bought it full of something and you got the deposit back when you “recycled” the bottle.
Too much hassle though. Those lazybirds among us couldn’t be bothered with the inconvenience. The short-term thinkers prevailed. Instant gratification, instant soup in a throwaway Styrofoam container.
Everything was cool until they realized it really wasn’t being thrown away. The Styrofoam caused CFCs to stick around and breakdown the ozone layer, and all the other throwaway manufactured products left carbon lingering in the atmosphere too—a residual scrum of the industrial age, warming the planet and melting the icecaps.
All because people weren’t conservative. A true conservative realizes that ownership requires stewardship. You take care of your property is you want it to yield larger returns.
What conservative would chop apart his mansion with axes just to satisfy a short term urge to build a fire. What high class fat cat would walk through his big house tossing trash and half eaten food on the expensive carpet, or flinging empty cans in the hallway—adding poison gasses to his attic as he burned cheap coal in the basement generator to power his light bulbs all night long.
And yet all of us do the equivalent every day. Thoughtlessly squandering power and water as we throw stuff away.
The cheapskate, penny-pinching, miserly, conservative, environmentalist in me cringes from the waste.
America, ya gotta love it.